Day 1 Of South By Southwest

I am at the South by Southwest festival here in Austin, Texas and things are just getting started. Here are a few observations and experiences that I had on day 1 of the festival.

Picking up a device – Since I had decided I would not be lugging a laptop to the convention center, the first task at hand was to pick the equipment I was going to take along. I ended up with the E72 and the N900. The E72 decision was simple, I do not have a local SIM and the Boingo plus Truphone combo negates the need for one. Since both these apps work well on the E72, it became an obvious choice because of dependable battery life. The next question was N86 v N900. Since I was not taking the laptop, the N900’s power was very tempting and the camera on the N86 was tempting too. However, the E72 can do most things the N86 can and I wanted a large screen device, the N86 took a back seat.

Of Macs & iPhones – The moment I entered the convention center all I could see were Macbooks and iPhones. On my way to Austin I did see a lot of Droids and Blackberrys which made be think that Amercica was changing, but no. Its all about Apple here. (Just so you know, I use a Macbook as well).

Sessions – Inbetween all the fun we were having I was able to attend a few sessions here and there. One of which was about how technology is affecting relationships and another was a discussion between developers about making games for the iPhone. Between all the cribbing about the approval process the one thing that stood out for me was the fact that they acknowledge that the golden age of the App Store is over as far as the devs are concerned. With a billion apps, its just too hard for your app to get noticed.

Symbian – Oddly enough, while I was at the Apple discussion, I also noticed a pretty ‘out there’ invitation from Symbian. In every SXSW goody bag, Symbian has managed to put in one of these awesome cards. Ideally we should have seen something like the Apple roundtable for Symbian as well, but this is not a perfect world, at least not yet.

Its 9 AM here in Austin and we are just about start day 2 of SXSW and if the first day was anything to go by, today is going to be even more fun.